August 6, 1961

Vostok 2

Vostok 2 launches Gherman Titov on the first day-long human spaceflight

The first person scheduled to sleep in orbit woke to find his arms stretched out toward the spacecraft controls.

06:00 UTC from Baikonur

Vostok 2 lifted off at approximately 06:00 UTC on 6 August 1961 carrying Gherman Titov, aged 25 years and 329 days. He became the second human to orbit Earth, after Yuri Gagarin, and began the first human spaceflight intended to last a complete day.

Sergei Korolev had pushed for a day-long second mission rather than a much shorter one, to test whether a person and the Vostok systems could work through a full cycle in weightlessness.

Titov activated the spacecraft's manual attitude-control system and filmed Earth and the sky with a space-modified Konvas movie camera, whose exposure meter had been damaged during launch.

The first case of space sickness

During the flight Titov developed nausea and vomiting associated with weightlessness — the first documented case of space sickness. Several planned pieces of work were disrupted.

He strapped himself into his seat for the first scheduled sleep in space. On waking, he found his arms outstretched near the controls and needed time to reorient himself.

The mission demonstrated that one person could survive and perform some tasks across a day in orbit; his illness is why a stronger claim than that is not supportable.

Seventeen orbits, or seventeen and a half

Total flight duration was 25 hours and 18 minutes. NASA and the Smithsonian count 17 completed orbits; other accounts say more than 17, or 17.5, depending on whether the partial final revolution is included.

Titov returned on 7 August near Krasny Kut. Like other Vostok cosmonauts, he did not land inside the capsule — he ejected during descent and came down by parachute.

At 25 years and 329 days at launch, he remains the youngest person to have reached Earth orbit.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Sources variously describe the trajectory as 17 completed orbits, more than 17 orbits, or 17.5 revolutions. The difference reflects whether the partial final revolution before landing is counted.
The flight began on August 6, but Titov did not pass the 24-hour mark or land until August 7.